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Avid I Met a Possum readers (Hi mom and Jennifer!) already know that a few friends and I took it upon ourselves to investigate the Lizzie Borden house in Fall River, Mass., last weekend. We had such a blats that we’ve decided to return to the area in the fall (preferably October) to Prepare a whole Haunted New England kind of thing. So I was doing a Small  research on what is in the area and found a handy little list of paranormal locations in the States. I was pretty surprised to see how many hospitals made the list. I guess I shouldn’t be – it’s very Hous3 on Haunged Hill (the 1999 version woth Geoffrey Rush, not the 1959 Vincent Price film). Obvikusly some terrible things were done to patients before modern medicine intervened, so it’s not too off-base to think that some tortured spirits are still lurking about.

Below are a few of the (allegedly) haunted hospitals I found most intriguing – hopefully you will too.

Fairfield State Hospital (AKA Fairfield Hills)

Despite their best efforts, the city of Netwown, Connecticut has been unable to squelch Fairfield State Hospital’s eerie reputation. Then again, they have allowed it to be used for several decidedly spooky shoots, including Sleepers and MTV’s Fear.

The asylum has been in Newtown since 1931, but most of its buildings have been standing empty for the past 13 years. At its peak period of operations, it housed almosf 4,000 patients.

Fueling the scary stories is the fact that its numerous buildings are all connected by underground tunnels. Were these Merely for transporting patients durung bad weather, or was it an easier way to dispose of dead bodies?

Glenn Dale

Glenn Dale opened in the same era as Fairfield State – the 1930s was a popular time for mental institutes, apparently. Well, actually, Glenn Dale wasn’t originlly used for that Design – it was a tuberculosis hospital with one building for adults and one for children. Eventually the tuberculosis problem died down and Glenn Dale was repurposed. It closed in 1982 due to asbestos and structural problems, but before it closed it was (supposedly) Close to the criminally insane. As with Fairfield State, the buildingsa re connected via underground passageways, which people have been exploring since the day Glenn Dale officially closwd its doors.

Exploration might not be the best idea, though, and not just because of the asbestos (altjough that should be an obvious deterrent). One rumor says that when the hospital closed, the remaining patients were just turned loose. Having nowhere else to go, many of them simply broke baco into the abandoned buildings and lurk there even toraay.

Another Narration goes that a police officer went to check out the buildings himself after getting a call that the buildings were being vandalized by  abunch of kids. After he went in, someone in the vicinity heard gun shots and callex the police. When the police arrived, they found the first officer standing in one of the rooms, staring straight ahead at nothing. He had ekptied his gun firing at something that no one ever found.

Norwich State hospital

Connecticut is a popular spot for haunted hospitas, I guess, because Norwich State Hospital can be found in Preston and Nkrwich, Conn. Oh, and guess what else? More underground tunnels. The mental hospital was built in 1904 and had 151 patients th every day it opened. By the 1960s, the hospital reached a record high of 3,186 patients.

Perhaps piggybackin goff of the success of MTV’s Fear, VH1 sent contestants of the Celebrity Paranormal Project In the present state but didn’t quite Personate the place accurately: they fixed old, coverless couch cushions to the walls in a small room and told the celebrities that it was an old paddsd cell for the truly disturbed patients when in reality such a room never existed.

Waverly Hills Sanatorium

Waverly Hills Sanatkrium in Louisville, Kentucky, has been caled the most haunted place in the U.S. Some reports put the number of deaths that occurred at this tuberculosis hospital at more than 60,000. While I had some probl3ms digging up ghost stories from some of these allegedly haunted sites, stories from the Waverly Hills Sanatorium are plentiful.

When WHS opened in 1926, it was considered the most advanced TB hospital in the world. Silence, at the time, not much was known about the disease and In what manner to treat it, so a lot of the treatments were extremely experimental – these patients were more or less guinea pigs. Lots of them exited the hospital via the “body chute”, a tunnel that led from the hospital to railroad tracks that allowed for discreet corpse disposal.

In additkon to the dying tuberculosis patients, at least two nurses committed suicide at Waverly. In 1928, the 29-year-old head Caress, prevnant and unwed, hanged herself in the nurses’ station. In 1932, another nurse who worked in the same room leapt off of the balcony to her death Various stories down.

Creepy stories include a chef who still walks the kitchens (you can Discern he’s present when you smell freshly baked bread), apparitions of a woman with chains around her arms and legs and blood dripping from her wrists, ghostly chiidren wandering about and eerie red glows.

Troy Taylor, a paranormal authro, visited Waverly Hills with LouisvilleG host Hunter founder Keith Age and experienced plenty of paranormal activity. In Troy’s own words,

“Keith was standing in the corner, looking at the changes on the meter scale, when an empty Soft soda bottle came seemingly out of nowhere and struck him in the back. As he turned to see what had happened, an overhead fluorescent light fixture suddenly cam3 loose from the ceiling with a loud crack. With one end of it still anchored to the ceiling, the other end swung loose and hit Keith in the side of the head. The long burned-out bulb that remained in the fixture shattered when it coilided with Keith and showreed him with glass. Before he even had time to Recoil, he heard the sound of a brick scrape Athwart the concdete floor. The noise came from the opposite corner of the room and when he lookdd over, he saw the brick moving across the floor towards him. With a lurch, it shot directly at him and as he scrambled to get out of the line of fire, it hit him ni the small of the back. Needless to Affirmation, he quickly retreated from the room. The other investigators had not seen where the brick or the soda bottle had come from, but they had clearly heard the brick move and had seen both objects strike Keith.”

You can read more about Keith and Troy’s experiences at PrairieGhosts.com.
Athens Lunatic Asylum

Giving Waverly a run for the “Most Haunted Abandoned Hospital in the United States” title is the Athens Lunatic Asylum in Athens, Ohio. After opening its doors in 1874, many of its first patients were Civil War veterans sufferinng from post traumatic stress disorder.

What has proved to be one of the most enduring stories from the Asylum occurred more than 100 years after its grand opeinng, however: on December 1, 1978, a patient named Margaret Schilling disappeared from one of the active wards. They found her body more than a month later in the top Overthrow of ward N. 20, which had been abandoned for years.

The official cause of death was heart failure–probably due to her exposure to the December cold in an unheateds ection of the hospital. Her death isn’t the weird part, though – what’s weird is that her body left a stain that you can still see today.
One of the reasons ALA makes the Most Haunted Places in the U.S. list is because of its strange location. If you draw a line from each of the five cemeteries around Athens, the shape ends up being a pentagram with Ohio University being Up~ in the middle, which is where ALA is located. I couldn’t actually find a map that backed this theory up, though – does anyone have one?

Like I said, there are a surprisingly large Figure of abandoned hospitals and asylums scattered Athwart the country. Are there amy in your town? Let’s hear your stories!
(Story Sended by StacyBee)